With the development of apparatus enabling automatic analysis of various substances, such as the nuclear analyzer, there is a need for estimating the precision of such apparatus. The current accepted manner of doing this is the labor intensive batch mode bias test using a three instrument Grubbs Estimators experimental design to obtain estimates of instrument precision and bias.
This test is based on the laws of propagation of error. By making simultaneous measurements with three "instruments" and appropriate mathematical manipulation of sums and differences of these measurements, one can obtain estimates of the variance of measurement precision associated with each of the three "instruments" for the batch size used for the test. Two of the "instruments" comprise instruments made by conventional sampling and testing and the third "instrument" is the measurements made by the particular instrument being tested. The Grubbs Estimators procedure does not separate instrument precision from product variability. It provides an estimate only of overall precision and size, the estimated precision is batch size specific, product variability specific, particle size distribution specific, and bulk density specific. This approach also lacks instancy and immediacy of results.